The invention relates to measuring incident radiation by scintillation.
Zinc sulfide scintillation materials, while efficient in their conversion of incident radiation into scintillation photons, suffer from long decay times, i.e., decay times greater than 100 nanoseconds. In other words while these materials convert incident radiation into scintillation photons for measurement very efficiently (at an efficiency of at least 10%), they emit a significant number of these scintillation photons very slowly. For example, where the incident radiation is photons of electromagnetic radiation, the scintillation photons produced by an incident photon are produced a relatively long time after the incidence of the incident photon on the order of seconds. The relatively long decay time of zinc sulfide scintillation materials has been one of the factors discouraging their use in scintillation-based measurement devices.